My pop's in the roofing business, we go through wooden pallets like crazy, like about 60-80 pallets in one month. 99% of them get thrown out when we finish a job, we dump them at the landfill along with the ripped old shingles. Always seems to me that it was such a waste throwing these things away, with retail lumber these days being far from cheap, I bet a resourceful prepper could find a thousand uses from these.

The quality of lumber used to make these cheap pallets are probably not the best, many of them are irregular pieces of knotty, gnarly softwood nailed or stapled to together, but there are nice straight boards between the bad ones. Once in a while you get a few knock out from quality cedar boards, scrap from a deck or fencing job I suppose. Either way, the pallets themselves are not exactly shoddy or weak things, seeing how they can handle up to 2000-3000 lbs of shingles sitting on top of them. I could probably make a nice zombie-proof wall with these to surround my lot, if I could find a way to lug them all home .

In any case, they're not exactly uncommon in the urban environment, our supplier has probably half a thousand empty pallets stacked up in the back of his suburbs store/warehouse. Then you have your local retail, light industrial, distribution warehouses,...etc, a dozen places within an hour's walk with probably the most readily available source of wood you're going to find in a large town or city environment. You can probably get wood from other sources, but the boards on a pallet are easy to pry off with a crowbar or claw hammer, and they're in manageable/carriable 4 feet lengths. Good for boarding up windows and doors, making repairs or improvements to structures, and maybe even to split and turn into shafts for bolts and arrows.

The only thing that's probably not a good idea to used them for is firewood, seeing how most of these pallets get deliver along with goods from elsewhere, most of them are require to be fumigated or sprayed with poisonous pesticides to prevent invasive insects and pests from hitching a ride over the border. So don't burn your pallet wood! Though the pesticide treatment is a plus if we're going to be using them to build stuff outside.

If you get the type of volume you were talking about on a pretty regular basis...say what 60 to 80 pallets x month, if you have the means (being that the family business is in roofing, I am willing to bet you do have access to a flatbed truck) do a Google search for a freight business that buys pallets back in your area.

In my AO which is primarily commercial / industrial transportation center near O'Hare airport, a train depot and several truck shipping outfits, there are several businesses that will give you anywhere between $2.80 to $3.20 per pallet so long as they are in undamaged serviceable condition. Regardless of how rough they look.

At 80 x $3.00 = $240.00, your overhead of course would be gas and man hours to get them all up on the truck, but I don't see why you cannot turn these into a little slush fund payday, especially if you guys always have a steady supply of them coming in.

colinz wrote:
ZS - Where having livestock, land and a good attitude is more desirable than being Size <6, 'ripped', or rich.

You can knock together the frame for a shed or other out building out of them really quickly. Then, you can insulate them, and plank, or single the outside, make it water proof, and it's gonna last about as long as any of these shoddy wooden houses you have in the New World

we use the pallets for firewood all the time. most of the ones here are plain untreated pine. they are built cheap and are disposable. we have an airtight stove in the basement and a fire pit out back. you have to be a little picky with them, if they are suspect then pass until you find others.

there are some that you can tell they have been shipped form another part of the world, you just pass on them. came across one time that was this beautiful dark hardwood. no idea what it was.

litegod wrote:.... there are some that you can tell they have been shipped form another part of the world, you just pass on them. came across one time that was this beautiful dark hardwood. no idea what it was.

The drumming circles in San Diego would keep an eye out for pallets from Indonesia and Malaysia because the often contained exotic hardwood that they would salvage to make drums.

Priests and cannibals, prehistoric animals
Everybody happy as the dead come home

Big black nemesis, parthenogenesis
No-one move a muscle as the dead come home

Depending on condition, I have about twenty things to build. Basically every possible piece of furniture a house needs, from tables and chairs to counters and headboards, bookshelves, entertainment centers, and anything else under the sun.

Pallet uses are many. Some of what you can use them for does depend on what materials are in making the pallet, soft woods or hard woods. And of course the condition of the pallet.

Fences, Sheds, Chicken coops, planters, furniture, flooring, decking, boardwalk walkways, and on the list goes. Here is a site of 107 pallet project ideas http://www.snappypixels.com/diy-ideas/1 ... and-ideas/ There are many other sites that list 50 or 25 or some other number of pallet projects, most overlap with the same projects, but might have a few different ones. There are tons of folks who have shared their pallet project ideas online, if you search for them, you just might be amazed at what folks do with pallets. Some of the projects are rough and obviously pallets, but some you no longer can even tell they were once pallets.

Pallets are a great prepper resource for DIY projects. That pallets are often given free for the taking, which can really help the prepper budget.

"Once a man has seen society's black underbelly, he can never turn his back on it. Never pretend, like you do, that it doesn't exist"

"None of you seem to understand. I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here with ME!"

Craigslist them for free or cheap if you just want to get rid of them. There are a ton of ideas I see on Facebook/Pinterest (that friends post) for arts and crafts stuff, to disassembling them and building simple shops and domiciles, or using the wood for flooring. This site has some ideas.

In my day, we didn't have virtual reality.
If a one-eyed razorback barbarian warrior was chasing you with an ax, you just had to hope you could outrun him.
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Preps buy us time. Time to learn how and time to remember how. Time to figure out what is a want, what is a need.